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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29061447">Shell Game</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mynameisdoubleg/pseuds/Mynameisdoubleg'>Mynameisdoubleg</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 08:15:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,004</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29061447</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mynameisdoubleg/pseuds/Mynameisdoubleg</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Barabbas watched his Sergeant die. Or did he? Bound within a faulty, ageing Dreadnought and wholly dependent on it for contact with the outside world, Barabbas can no longer tell past from present, the dead from the living or the real from illusion. After six centuries, he’s not sure such distinctions even matter.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Shell Game</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I am here. I am here and I am here and I am here. Always and forever here, in this shell within a shell, a box both infinitely small and extending forever. The wall of it must be right in front of my face, if I had eyes to see it. It might as well be on the other side of the galaxy.<br/>There is only darkness in here. No light, no smell or touch. Nothing soft or kind. There is lots to hear over the speakers though, explosions and gunfire and screams and pleading. Plenty to see on this thing clamped to my face. <br/>Like the top half of what used to be Sergeant Glaukos, now lying at my feet. <br/>A brother has died. Yet another one. I watched as his organs slithered out, birthed from the bottom of his torso one by one. That, at least, was a little different.<br/>I wanted to reassure him, to tell him he was one of the lucky ones. At least he was there, among the dying, and not here. Not inside this thing.<br/>The air pulses as bolter rounds boom and echo all around, but its ceramite skin is proof against such irrelevant nothings. It is only a battle, yet another one. Attention wanders. The details of the moment are abraded away by the timeless repetition of the scene. They said I would not dream. Yet this endless litany of death makes me wonder.<br/>The sensorium on this thing is old, unreliable, and it missed whatever happened to Glaukos. Perhaps I killed him. Perhaps it did. It is a killing thing, this Dreadnought, that is what it was designed to do. The only thing it can do. The only way I touch is to destroy—I am a hammer, the world, my nail. <br/>“Barabbas!” my sensorium detects the sound. It’s Captain Telamon—he’s looking up at me, and I sense he’s been calling my name for some time. Little tiny thing that he is. Let’s hear what he wants: “They are massing for another attack!”<br/>Ah yes, I had forgotten the battle. Killing, that is what I do. I lumber back towards the barricade. Across the field of rubble and the wreck of a centuries-old city, my sensorium highlights our enemies. Once pure like us, now corrupted by long eons entrapped in the Warp. Driven mad by their prison. Beneath their barbed armor, diseased flesh bubbles like something that wriggled out of Glaukos, barely human. They snarl and spit and curse. They are hateful things that know only hate.<br/>I do not hate them. They do not understand that hate is nothing, a shadow in the night, darkness destined to fade into darkness. A dream. After this battle, there will be another. And another and another, without end. Each one lasting an instant, and going on forever and ever, and ever.<br/>I raise a hand and beckon them forward. Come. I am here. I am always here.<br/>The enemy charges, leaping and crawling and scrabbling across the open ground and I slip into the battle trace, lost in an eternal thoughtless moment, moving by instinct and muscle memory. The world is reduced to momentum and trajectories, fields of fire, ballistic curves and deflection angles. I could do this in my sleep.<br/>At some point the old and faulty targeting system fails and I fire on manual. It feels better this way anyway. No distracting interface, only the elemental purity of lightning and thunder, of death following wherever my gaze falls. Then the speakers stop working and I fight in silence. I have to use my imagination, taking my cues from the gentle currents and eddies in the gel-fluid in which my withered skin soaks. There, that is the recoil as my assault cannon fires, regular as a lullaby. Explosions detonate in silence, their passing felt like a hand at my back or nudge at my side. Tiny shivers as claws scratch at my hull like the fingernails of drowning sailors. Open mouths flap and yawn as shrapnel and plasma tear through the bodies below them.<br/>I fill in the noises for myself, gurgling and moaning and roaring about the tube permanently stuck down my throat. “Wurrr!” as the Dreadnought’s fist smears an enemy across a stretch of wall. “Yaah!” as cannon fire blasts another in two, legs popping into the air like the cork from a bottle of amasec. “Please no!” Another. “No, stop!” Another. “Barabbas what are you doing?” Yet another.<br/>A figure stands before me, helmetless, its hands raised. That will not save it. The Dreadnought feels nothing, it is a killing thing, and so am I. They have kept me here, neither dead nor alive, to do this one thing and nothing will stay my hand. The figure mouths something as I approach, over and over again, and I realize it is my name: Barabbas, Barabbas, Barabbas, it says. I am pleased to be so well known among my foes. I raise my cannon arm in salute before I kill them.<br/>Barabbas wait, Barabbas stop, Barabbas you are sick.<br/>I burble the words back to myself, here in my little tank. Brbbswt, brbbastp, brbbsyrsck. Meaningless nonsense sounds.<br/>A single shot takes the figure full in the chest. It punches through ceramite as easily as flesh, blows their organs out their back with meteorite impact ferocity, lifts them off their feet and then smashes them back to the ground again. I feel it land, a little quiver in my embalming fluid. I mimic the thud, quietly to myself.<br/>The battle ends, as it always must. The rest of the company are dead, they are all dead, every one of them. I find Captain Telamon lying in the middle of the field. He has taken off his helmet. Foolish. A single cannon round has taken him squarely in the chest, punching a round O of surprise straight through him. Even Captain Telamon has fallen.<br/>And yet, I am still here. <br/>I am always here.</p>
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